"Tauchnitz. That's not a familiar name," he said, picking a paperback book in the library of a man long departed. He read out: "Tauchnitz Edition: Collection of British and American authors, Vol 4941." It is white in colour, off-white by now, rather squarish, tells you that it is printed in Leipzig by Bernhard Tauchnitz and that it must not be introduced into the British Empire and USA. The number 4941 gives, naturally, the number of book titles printed to date, and the date is June 1930. Number 4937, featured on the back page, by the way, is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. It states that it is a collection of British and American authors, but there are quite a few Irish names.
Yeats is there with a selection from his poetry. Oscar Wilde has 10 volumes, from the Portrait of Dorian Gray to The Importance of Being Earnest, and poems. Somerville and Ross have two volumes, Naboth's Vineyard and Dan Russell the Fox. Swift, of course, with Gulliver's Travels and Synge is represented by a volume of his plays and his book The Aran Islands. Shaw gets 15 volumes, several of them covering two and three plays. Liam O'Flaherty has two titles, The House of Gold and The Mountain Tavern and other stories. George Moore is there with six volumes, not including Hail and Farewell. How many people have read Hurrish, a novel by the Hon Emily Lawless? Well it's there. Many English classics in poetry, drama and the novel.
Among the 20th-century writers is the volume which our friend picked up: Bliss and other stories by Katherine Mansfield. This library certainly went on well in the Thirties, but did it fold up at the outbreak of war? Print and paper were good. Not that paperbacks were novel even then. Many of the books printed in Dublin in the earlier part of the century were paperbacks. There is a three-volume Wolfe Tone, two being of his letters and one The Life, edited by Bulmer Hobson and published by Martin Lester Ltd, of Dawson Street. (Two and sixpence each, i.e. one eight of a pound or a half-crown as it was.) They weren't known as paperbacks, just "in wrappers", while what are hardbacks were officially Stiff Boards. Tauchnitz pointed out that they paid Continental copyright and were not dodging anything when they excluded sale in Britain and USA. Y